[Newspoetry] schiavo triptych punched

[Donald L Emerick]

Terri Schiavo, 41, Dies at Fla. Hospice
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15423-2005Mar31.html?nav=hcmodule
first a Synopsis, below it, a Reaction --- maybe, someone can find a poem to sing from this tangle of notes...


Speaking at the White House on the occasion of the release of a new report on U.S. intelligence, Bush said, "The essence of civilization is that the strong have a duty to protect the weak.  In cases where there are serious doubts and questions, the presumption should be in favor of life."


The case raised an issue that "transcends politics," Jeb Bush said.  "How we deal with life itself -- I mean, the beginning of life and the end of life -- is something that I think we need to learn how to do better."


Judge Stanley F. Birch Jr.[had] sharply criticized the intervention by the U.S. Congress and executive branch.  He wrote that the March 21 law was unconstitutional because it violated the separation of powers doctrine and that therefore the federal courts lacked [any] jurisdiction in the Schiavo case.



 Schindlers claimed that their daughter not only had some awareness, but had attempted to say, "I want to live," before her feeding tube was removed.  It was a last-ditch attempt to refute years of diagnoses that she had suffered an irreversible loss of brain function and had no cognitive ability.  A judge rejected the claim.


In any case, any political dividends seemed to vanish when polls showed Americans overwhelmingly opposed the federal intervention in the Schiavo case, and President Bush's approval rating plummeted to an all-time low.  {By 70 to 30, the people say “no federal intervention; by 80 to 20, the people say, “let me die when my brain is dead;”  Bush himself fell from 52% to 45% OK in this week of the Night of the Living Dead.}


{Husband Schiavo pursued therapy for his wife for several years after the heart attack that preceded her persistent vegetative state (PVS).  And, when it later appeared, perhaps fortuitously, that the heart attack might have been induced by medical malpractice (failure to diagnose and treat this serious condition), Schiavo sued and won damages, some for loss of consortium (the living and active presence of his wife in their family).  This consortium award constituted a potential gold mine that Ms. Schiavo’s parents could not ignore.  But, how could they get that pile of gold?  Ah, there’s the back rub of this case: to get this money, they’d have to show that they loved their daughter more than her husband did.  So, despite their own prior sworn testimony that their daughter would have wanted to die, if she were in a PVS, the parents suddenly discovered, VOILA, religion.}

{The latest substantive judge} Greer also wrote in his ruling that the 1993 falling-out between Michael Schiavo and the Schindlers clearly "was predicated on money and the fact that Mr. Schiavo was unwilling to equally divide his [$300,000] loss of consortium award with Mr. and Mrs. Schindler."  The judge added, "Regrettably, money overshadows this entire case and creates potential conflict of interest for both sides." 

An appeals court upheld the decision in January 2001.  In its ruling, Florida's 2d District Court of Appeal said Terri Schiavo's brain had "deteriorated" in the decade since her heart attack."  “By mid 1996
much of her cerebral cortex is simply gone and has been replaced by cerebral spinal fluid.  Medicine cannot cure this condition."

The 2003 guardian ad litem report by Jay Wolfson said neurological tests had measured Terri Schiavo's "persistent vegetative state," concluding that her cerebral cortex had shrunk and that her brain tissue had "continued to devolve." 

The report said her behavior -- breathing on her own, sometimes appearing to track movements or respond to sounds when awake, occasionally groaning or making other noises -- is characteristic of persons in a PVS.  This behavior "is attributable to brain stem and forebrain functions that are reflexive, rather than cognitive," the report said. 
*****

REACTION: (Posted to Washington Post editors, as written in black paint on the black walls of bleak oblivion):

This was an excellent article, insightfully covering many of the main dimensions of the Schiavo story.  I have three critical concerns: one with the choice of the headline, the second with your serious refusal to investigate (report upon) the Catholic Church's sponsorship of this case, and the third with the shallowness of your critique of the monarchical character of the Bush clan.  (The imperial kings of Rome did not become Caesars except by a near familial control of the executive branch.)

1.  The headline to be truthful and consistent with the story, should have been something like "Body of Terri Schiavo dies; reunites with her soul, long parted."

But, of course, souls are never coverable by any respectable news media.  There are no reliable witnesses to support soul news, as a matter of objectivity.  However, if you have to throw a sop to the "soul" side, this headline would have been better than the fraudulent one you actually chose: "Terri Schiavo dies" because she has already long been dead, in every sense except for a bodily one.

Frog legs long severed from their bodies will kick -- and this has been known for two centuries -- but a few people still idolize the body, as if its quality of being alive were irrefutable proof of some transcendental issues.  (Scriptures say it the other way around, by the way: the sheer glory of the physical world proves that there is a God, while the passage of man through this world is totally a matter of free will.)

2.  Secondly, then, given the religious angle of this case and its extremely close connections to the Catholic political agenda, I have not yet seen a single good story, such as an insider in the Catholic Church might be able to give you.   Yes, I know the Jesuits and others will not reveal the extent to which the Church has poured years of effort (and thus, of course,  millions of dollars to support those efforts) into the Schiavo case.  Make no mistake about it, though, the true persistence in this case was not vegetative.  This was a case that was a well crafted, well formulated, and well managed.  And, it will not be the last such such "tokenized" legal case.

Deeper in legal history, you could see how the Catholic tracked down and "hired" (in a media use phase) the lead plaintiff in the Roe v Wade case.  They gave her a book, and a circuit to ride, enriching her for making many (essentially false) claims about the alleged child that she aborted.

3.  The complicity of the Bushes with this case is just a matter of their usual crass political opportunism.  Bush family greed and lust ought to be a legendary matter in America, a matter of common knowledge, that the Bush family thinks it is a royalty-like dynasty for America.  but, their sordid royalist pretensions -- their vanities -- are nothing itself compared to the significance of the story that you do not even mention, about the extent of the Church's investment in this political ploy.  (I do not deny that the Church has sincerely legitimate motives of its own doctrines, but I also think it is sadly mistaken.)

Nonetheless, the Bush administration, as the Public Citizen constantly reminds us, is quite expressly a familial empire.  Perhaps, no regime in the world more resembled the familial character than the Hussein family control of Iraqi politics.  The tendency for some family group to have royalist pretensions is not some matter that public education ever addresses.

Call it the embracing character of elite politics, that it falls into a crude taxonomy's categories, somewhat, as Aristotle long ago described it -- before Hegelian evolutionists warped our views of the structure of history.  If you do not believe man has much evolved, as a being of nature, in 100 centuries, then you do not discard the patterns of all those centuries of evidence about how some families work to establish their rule over as many other families as possible.  That is, you should not commit the individualist fallacy in history, of thinking that history, even of a Caesar, is only about that man himself, without examing the dynastic dimensions, of how any Caesar will have dreamed of an infinite number of descending Caesars ruling, in succession, the whole of the world.  (Contrast with the first George of Washington.)

4.  Thanks again, for writing as much as you did.  Sincerely, Donald L Emerick


NEWSPOEM:
Dead is the flesh now,
dead as the mind it long since has lost,
death need not be a concurrency,
where everything goes at once.

When a lightbulb flashes and flares,
blinks incandescently brighter,
plunges the room into darkness,
we think that is how all lightbulbs die.

View more closely all lightbulbs,
for the set of them glows vast,
the diversity of tubes and bulbs,
white and yellow, other colors,
christmas strings of little candles,
pink-purple, orange-yellow, green and blue,
and of how they are hooked together,
that when one fails, they all fail,
or maybe, they're quasi-independent,
on a fuse or the wiring plan --
the end of one is just one end --
lights bind rules in dark kingdoms.

A single bulb flares and dies,
but sometimes, something hangs on,
some filament wire, tension broken,
yet lies across the embanked gap,
a brittle bridge swinging, swaying.

Oh, you can only swing across that bridge,
a rope bridge over canyon deep as space,
a gaping, yawing abyss that swallows all,
if your little spark, an electron free
runs in circles of electric currency.